


every warm-hearted love

by alsahm



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Akechi Goro Lives, Breaking Up & Making Up, Gen, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, abandoned work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-07 19:21:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14677758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alsahm/pseuds/alsahm
Summary: Ren said,I’ll handle Curses. Akechi, you focus on Bless skills.He'strying.





	1. prologue | lights in the night flickered in and out

**Author's Note:**

> this was a repost of something from autumn of last year... unfortunately it doesn't seem like i'll be able to finish it. i've left it up this time as i know some readers are attached. 
> 
> thank you so much for your support!
> 
> we are in an akechi-lives scenario a few months post-canon

Goro tucks an offending strand of hair behind his ear, eyes on his own image at the bottom-right corner of his screen. “It was instant ramen for dinner again, unfortunately,” he says, and sets down his mechanical pencil before glancing into the camera. “Surely you won’t admonish me? It was already so late when I returned that I’d no time to prepare anything of substance.” A pause, loud against the listening walls, in which he decides a smile is in order: “Although I doubt you managed better.”

Silence. Goro taps at his sound control, which cheerily echoes the click. Ren’s fan, however, doesn’t whirl with feedback, and his video feed is off because of his reportedly messy room. Yet their call is still going, forty-seven minutes and nine ten eleven seconds later. Tonight it has wavered between recounting the quotidian and a comfortable white noise, both of them pretending to do their homework; Goro has been frowning at arithmetic, and Ren’s presence only statics around him whenever he violently crosses out too-ugly kanji, or declares that he liked school better when Morgana fit inside his desk, or—

— _Bzzt_. At the least endearing of Rensonances: the incessant, tell-tale vibrations of his phone assaulted by messages.

Goro straightens in his chair, forcing down the tension in his neck and shoulders. He pulls the mic closer to his lips. “Ren.”

No response.

The toilet? Or maybe a snack? Except that Ren normally announces his departure and his return, or is so obvious about it that it certainly registers. No, Goro knows what this is:

“He’s asleep,” confirms the cat. Sounds like he’s nudging their boy. Then, defensively: “He’s had a long day.”

Asleep. Again. And who knows for how long; Goro has been emoting vague irritation at equations for a while now, interspersed occasionally with how, oh, he had shitty noodles for dinner again today! And how he finally picked up that book from the library, the one of which he couldn’t download the PDF, and how it keeps escaping him to buy new reflectors for his bike, and then, Ren, did you know? Today he managed once more to bore his sole confidant into the arms of the sister of death.

Focus. Kouga: At least Ren can be at ease in your presence.

Eigaon: How tiring can it be, spending all summer vacation perusing childhood manga from behind summer school textbooks (and that only “in case ‘Her Highness’ notices and tells Dad”)?

Scuffling from the other end, some groans. The fan, and Morgana successfully stirring Ren awake. Was he dreaming, Goro wonders, or was Ren too tired for such flights of fancy?

“Morgana?” Ren’s voice is already hoarse. Without his heart’s consent Goro imagines unruly hair and the smell of coffee and curry, even if that’s stupid, because Ren’s parents aren’t baristas and his room isn’t an attic over a café. Not anymore.

“I’m here, too,” he hears himself say. And for habit, a compliment: “Sleeping beauty.”

Ren has a lazy smile that sneaks part way up the right side of his face, and Goro pictures it paired with his drawl: “Dormina?”

“Of course not,” _it seems a tad unnecessary_. Auto-Dormina, was that a thing? He can’t remember; all those Personas and all those skills, and Goro never bothered to use anything so useless. It missed too often. It would heal the target. He’d have been there forever. “With your camera off?”

Ren _is_ tired. He doesn’t preen given the easy opportunity, and forgets to front Tokyo when he says, “Fair ‘nuff.” Then he moves and maybe says something else, but it’s muffled by the fan and Morgana’s prodding.

It grips at Goro’s chest to hear the physical contact.

“C’mon, Joker! Bed time. He’ll be there to flirt with toMEOW”—a violent shriek as, Goro suspects, Ren pats him affectionately on the head.

Then a sigh, Ren heaving himself up, maybe stretching. “Alrighty.” His breath is heavy with sleep. “‘Night.”

Goro swallows his disappointment, murmurs, “Sweet dreams.”

“Definitely need me summa that,” Ren says, and Morgana starts talking shit before they even disconnect.

Goro blinks at the screen, their log of shared hours and missed messages and YouTube links. He pulls out the white earbuds, one hand clutching his burning chest.

Huh.

With each call, he misses Ren more painfully than the last.

He hates it.


	2. one | freight trains of thought fought to stop & go

Goro didn’t think he would ever miss mass transportation. He’s mastered the standing and any claustrophobia, but nervous-looking or pointing passengers make him sick, and his head pounds at the ghost of Mementos’s atmosphere. The stations are no better; Yongen-Jaya forgotten, Shinjuku is too close to the bar at which he staked out some of his least favorite clientele, and the bakery in Shibuya reminds him of Ren when his hair somehow seemed unattractive and Goro had thought the glasses were real. Goro could turn that corner now and swear he’ll see him there, arms on the railing as he leans over Shibuya, watching, brow furrowed, as if it’s something at which to marvel.

All shadows to be avoided.

Center yourself. Kouga: Biking is good for you. Exercise releases anti-depressants, and if you close your eyes and convince yourself that your poisoned body indeed possesses normal human biology, you can almost feel them.

You taught yourself how to do this with your own hands and scrapes and bandages. You enjoy it.

Eiga: You’re tired. There’s a hole in your heart to mirror the one you just noticed in your bag, and both have parting seams. Your things will be lost to Tokyo smog by the time you realize their absence. Your head hurts, and if you could numb the entire left side of your face you would.

Ren said, _I’ll handle Curses. Akechi, you focus on Bless skills._

He’s trying.

Next signal, he pats his phone. It’s been vibrating with trivial news all day, Okumura’s new coffee shop location, an American idol pulling a concert. Of the three that text him, the only number worth a damn has a unique pulse, so Goro always knows whether it’s worth a reach. The default is work; the heartbeat can stand to be ignored.

He misses his smartwatch, sometimes. It was easier to ignore phantoms and didn’t involve a thumbprint scanner.

Green light, and on to Shibuya. This evening’s final detour is the alley opposite the Beef Bowl shop, and if he squints, he can already picture the tall, indigo doors, the small girl grinning at him with her baton. Goro never visited the Velvet Room outside the Metaverse until the blitz of that November, but he spied his keepers everywhere, well-placed reminders that Shido was his boss but Goro was the one chosen by God.

He hasn’t seen them since December. To be fair, he didn’t think to look.

Goro secures his cycle by the station and pulls up his hood, speed-walking toward the shop of the former yakuza from whom Ren bought his daggers and toy guns. All of Goro’s weapons until then had been very real despite Wakaba’s research; a hitman never knows when he himself will be hit. The SIU director practically handed Goro his first pistol on a silk cushion.

Goro curls his right hand into a fist, then relaxes, flexing his fingers.

What an absolute piece of shit.

There’s no girl, no blue door. Just like Akiba, just like Shinjuku and Jimbocho, where the entrance to hypnagogia once loitered there is only Goro’s faint memory of it, enough like vapor that if Goro thinks about it too hard he’ll convince himself it was made up.

So that’s it, is it. He’s not been beckoned to it in his dreams, he can’t find the path from this dimension, and the Meta-Nav is gone and so is Mementos.

Yet Sakamoto said, “Man, sure wish there was a way to stretch this guy’s legs,” and Kitagawa replied, “Haru and I have been meditating,” and Sakura went, “Necrobump much?”, and Okumura and Niijima had already left, so first Sakamoto said, “What?” then “OH,” and “Sorry,” explained that he’d been looking for something that he swore to Ann she’d said and had gone down all the way to October in its pursuit. Takamaki appeared to say she had found it and sent a cap already, _moron_ , and then, while Goro was still reading the rest, the group disappeared.

That was weeks ago.

They _meditated_. They could feel them?

Goro’s chest is burning again, life to the dormant lava between his heart and throat. Can he seize this fire? He hates it enough; he hates feeling this way and not knowing answers, and isn’t that what brought him there when it all began, so he presses his eyes shut so tightly they throb, and, oh God, he can see shadows just beyond, Caroline and Justine, small and obnoxious as they were, twins because two is company; Igor, a cold, cruel master beyond his tall, tall desk; that chair, hard-backed so guests didn’t think to linger at the birthplace of their assignments.

He opens his eyes. Nothing.

Maybe he should try for a lucid dream. It worked once before. Or is this different? If Ren were to appear in Shibuya today, would he see what Goro can’t?

Is this Goro’s banishment, or have their good hosts retired?

Think logically. It’s gone, Morgana said so, or else sealed away; he, useless cat that he is, wasn’t sure. But that was _Mementos_. Not the Metaverse entire, nor apparently Personas, and it cannot be that room. There were _people_ in there, and they were neither cognitive nor shadow. Those girls—or, that girl, now, whatever it was that Ren said happened—where would they go?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. None of your business now you’ve been expelled. Game over—isn’t that what Igor—Yaldabaoth—your God—said?

Losing places is nothing new to you. But then you never made it habit to need something from the ones that left you behind.

Breathe. Kouga: You are alive. Games are games and your life is not over if stagnant. Someone actually cares about you now, and despite yourself you have decided to care back. You are not entirely alone.

“Hey, kid,” a gruff voice from behind breaks through. Glancing back, Goro identifies the ex-yakuza, leaning on his storefront with a cigarette and a frown. “You got business ‘round here, or you looking for the police?”

“Oh, uh, please excuse me,” Goro says, and crouches, squinting purposefully at the ground. How good are yakuza at recognizing faces under hoods? “I was just—just looking for something, I dropped a—a watch, a few days ago.”

The man has a barking laugh with no malice. Goro gets the feeling he’s being taken lightly.

“Sorry,” he says, “I guess it’s not here, I’ll—if you’ll excuse me.”

And he turns, marching stiffly out the alley. Of course he feels the stare on his back.

Back to his cycle, back to nothing new on his phone. No entrance to the Velvet Room even with its key, neither Loki nor Robin Hood in his heart, no Cú Chulainn and no Cerberus. Sakura Futaba, he imagines, has Isshiki Wakaba’s research on several sticks of memory tossed around her room, answers tucked away to questions she’ll never have nor hear, and here he is with marginally related data stolen from Tokyo University off Big Bang Burger’s Wi-Fi, itself leaked into the bookstore because Goro, months and months and months later, now can’t step foot inside.

Ren keeps saying how much he misses it.

Goro swings one leg over his cycle and rides, chancing a glance to where the Phantom Thieves used to meet on spring days in Shibuya, talking loudly about rebellion and justice and thievery as if such vague passion could save every heart in Japan, their leader carefully observing the motions of the world below.

Eigaon: You’re mostly alone.

* * *

He arrives at his complex well past dusk, locks his cycle and retrieves his keys. He is committed to the stairs before he remembers the tear in his bag, and, tying in his exhaustion, begrudges himself the elevator with a sigh of mingled relief and self-loathing.

Inside, another check of his phone for a heartbeat:

> **ren**  
>  hey where’s the kettle

Goro rubs at his eyes with a finger, willing the message to make any sense.

> **goro**  
>  What?

The lift yawns to a stop. Goro treads to his apartment, still thinking of kettles and whether precise, nimble Ren would ever misfire a text. Setting down his things he raises his keys to the lock—

—of a door already ajar.

No. Don't panic.

Careful. Peer in—

Shoes pulled off by the heels piled beside his unshined loafers.

Shujin bag, sans cat, sat on his futon.

Amamiya Ren stepping out of his bathroom, and oh his nerve to smile and wave.


End file.
